A Five-Ring Opening Circus, Weirdly and Unabashedly British

Multiple “Mary Poppins” characters descending into the Olympic Stadium in London on Friday during the opening ceremony.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

LONDON — With its hilariously quirky Olympic opening ceremony, a wild jumble of the celebratory and the fanciful; the conventional and the eccentric; and the frankly off-the-wall, Britain presented itself to the world Friday night as something it has often struggled to express even to itself: a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is.

The noisy, busy, witty, dizzying production somehow managed to feature a flock of sheep (plus a busy sheepdog), the Sex Pistols, Lord Voldemort, the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a suggestion that the Olympic rings were forged by British foundries during the Industrial Revolution, the seminal Partridge Family reference from “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” a group of people dressed like so many members of Sgt. Pepper’s band, some rustic hovels tended by rustic peasants, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and, in a paean to the National Health Service, a zany bunch of dancing nurses and bouncing sick children on huge hospital beds.

It was neither a nostalgic sweep through the past nor a bold vision of a brave new future. Rather, it was a sometimes slightly insane portrait of a country that has changed almost beyond measure since the last time it hosted the Games, in the grim postwar summer of 1948.

Britain was so poor then that it housed its athletes in old army barracks, made them bring their own towels and erected no buildings for the Games. The Olympics cost less than £750,000, turned a small profit and made the nation proud that it had managed to rise to the occasion in the face of such adversity.

There was that same sense of relief intermingled with self-satisfaction this time. But such was the grandeur of 2012, even in these tough economic times, that 80,000 people sat comfortably in a new Olympic Stadium, having traveled by sleek new bullet trains and special V.I.P. road lanes to a new park that has completely transformed once-derelict east London.

A little rain fell, but it hardly mattered. Queen Elizabeth II was there, after co-starring with a tuxedoed Daniel Craig, also known as James Bond, in a witty video in which she appears to parachute from a helicopter (in fact, she entered the park the usual way). Looking mystified at times — the ceremony was pitched to a generation different from hers — she presided over a bevy of lesser royals and Prime Minister David Cameron.

The first lady, Michelle Obama, was in the audience to cheer on the United States athletes, who, it must be said, did a lot of cheering for themselves anyway during the athletes’ procession. And Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was there, too, although he was practically Public Enemy No. 1 around here after he appeared to question the British capacity for enthusiasm, something only Britons are allowed to do.

One of the biggest secrets of the night — who would light the Olympic caldron — was revealed at the end of the 3-hour-45-minute show, when seven teenage athletes took over from the British rower Steve Redgrave, who carried the torch into the stadium. The ceremony, conceived and directed by the filmmaker Danny Boyle, was two years in the making. As is the case almost every Olympics, much of the speculation around it centered on how Britain could possibly surpass the previous summer host, China. In 2008, Beijing used its awe-inspiring opening extravaganza to proclaim in no uncertain terms that it was here, it was rich, and the world better get used to it.

But outdoing anyone else, particularly the new superpower China, was not the point for a country that can never hope to re-create the glory days of its empire. Mr. Cameron, the prime minister, said this week that London’s are “not a state-run Games — it is a people-run Games,” and Boris Johnson, the London mayor, noted sharply that Britain was not planning to “spend our defense budget” on “pyrotechnics” but would take pride in being “understated but confident.”

That the Olympics come at a time of deep economic malaise, with Britain teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession, the government cutting billions of dollars from public spending, and Europe lurching from crisis to crisis, made the scene a bit surreal, even defiant in the face of so much adversity.

Photo

A maypole, still a staple of May Day celebrations in Britain, was part of the opening ceremony, conceived and directed by the filmmaker Danny Boyle.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The crowd in the stadium sat in a bubble of excitement. In the wider park, volunteers have been behaving with an enthusiasm that seems bewilderingly un-British. But out in the rest of the country, critics have been questioning the expense, the ubiquitously heavy-handed security apparatus, and the rampant commercialism of the Games.

In The Guardian, the columnist Marina Hyde said government officials appeared to be rashly depending on the Olympics, which cost an estimated £9.3 billion (or $14.6 billion), to save the country’s struggling economy virtually single-handedly.

Referring to a British track-and-field star, Ms. Hyde wrote that according to the government’s thinking, “Jessica Ennis winning gold is no longer merely a sporting aspiration but something that would cause a massive and immediate recalibration of the balance of payments.”

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The final cost, or benefit, of the Games will never really be known. But for now, the fact that things went smoothly on Friday was in itself a minor cause for celebration.

Mr. Boyle said he did not want to seem extravagant, particularly in a time of economic trouble, as he was given the daunting task of trying to find a way for Britain to account for itself in this difficult moment in its long history. The country has always eagerly celebrated its past: its military victories, its kings and queens, its glorious cultural and intellectual achievements. But it has a harder time celebrating its present.

A quixotic exercise in self-branding, during which the then-Labour government thought to unite the country by coming up with what it called a British “statement of values,” devolved into near-farce a few years ago when the public greeted it with ridicule rather than enthusiasm. The Times of London mischievously sponsored a motto-writing contest; the winner was “No Motto Please, We’re British.”

The ceremony seemed to reflect that view, too, suggesting that the thing that is most British about the British is their anarchic spirit and their ability to laugh at themselves. It is hard to imagine, for instance, the Chinese including, as the British did, a clip of the comic actor Rowan Atkinson inserted into the opening scene from “Chariots of Fire,” shoving the other runners out of the way (and ending with a rude noise paying tribute to British lavatorial humor).

The ceremony, too, reflected the deeply left-leaning sensibilities of Mr. Boyle. It pointedly included trade union members among a parade of people celebrating political agitators from the past, a parade that also included suffragists, Afro-Caribbean immigrants who fought for minority rights, and the Jarrow hunger marchers, who protested against unemployment in 1936.

It would not be lost on Mr. Boyle that unions have suffered in Britain in recent years, particularly at the hands of the Conservative Party, led by Mr. Cameron. But he devised the ceremony, he said, with no political interference.

That proved highly irritating to at least one politician, Aiden Burley, a Conservative member of Parliament, who denounced on Twitter what he referred to as the ceremony’s “leftie multicultural” content.

“The most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen — more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state!” he posted grumpily.

Who knows how the country will feel when the Olympics are over? But when the British athletes entered the stadium at the end of the procession of countries, they did so to a recording of David Bowie, a quintessential British oddity and supreme self-reinventor. “We can be heroes,” the song goes, “just for one day.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Five-Ring Opening Circus, Weirdly and Unabashedly British. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe